Sign in

Lois Weisberg (1925–2016)

For many years, Lois Weisberg oversaw arts and entertainment in the Windy City as the head of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs.Credit Photograph by Peter Thompson / The New York Times / Redux

Lois Weisberg died yesterday, at the age of ninety. According to the Chicago Reader, Weisberg, who worked for decades as the head of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs, was “the former linchpin of nearly everything that’s cultural about Chicago.” She was also one of Malcolm Gladwell’s most memorable Profile subjects. In 1999, Gladwell wrote a piece about her called “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg,” in which he argued that Weisberg, through her vast social network—she was unstoppably energetic and extraordinarily extroverted—“make[s] the world work.” Weisberg knew almost everybody, and almost everybody else knew somebody who knew her. People like Weisberg, Gladwell argued, are the unknown hubs around which the rest of us spin: because they know so many different kinds of people, “they spread ideas and information. They connect varied and isolated parts of society.”

That may sound very abstract. If so, consider this anecdote from the piece—one of many:

Once, in the mid-fifties, on a whim, Lois took the train to New York to attend the World Science Fiction Convention and there she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Lois, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Lois recalls. “He said, ‘Is there anyone in Chicago I should meet?’ I told him to come over to my house.” Lois has a throaty voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice. “I called Bob Hughes, one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, ‘Do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert . . . Robert Heinlein.’ So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, ‘Lois’—I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.”

Weisberg may be gone, but the connections she made endure. If you’re a subscriber, you can read “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg” in our online archive.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.